“No. But perhaps I might, if you had gone with me. I didn’t know the house and couldn’t get about it fast enough.”
“No use. I have been about it at full speed, like a madman. No use.”
“Have you seen nothing?” inquired Underhill, wondering why Turner covered his eyes.
“No,” answered the haunted man, dropping his hands, “I tell you there is nothing to be seen.” After a moment he added, “I was afraid I might see something.”
“O, I met your niece upstairs,” said Underhill. “She told me to tell you—well, it is very unaccountable and painful; but she has a strong impression that her brother—a drummer-boy, she called him—that he is dead.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Turner, springing to his feet and staring at the young man with an expression of intense horror. “What did you tell me that for? O my God! What did you say it for? Do you want to drive me into the grave? Don’t you see that I can’t bear such things?”
After walking about the room for a moment, he partially recovered his self-possession, and broke out peevishly: “What does the fool mean by such nonsense! I won’t have it in my house—I won’t have people under my roof talking such nonsense.”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Turner. I was in fault for telling you. Don’t lay blame upon her. I assure you that she was quite beside herself with emotion.”
As the only response to this was a groan, Underhill concluded that he could do little good by prolonging his stay, and, after a few words of useless sympathy, he took his departure.
During the next day, he learned something new about the Turners. It is time now to explain that he was a lawyer, and that he had set up his virgin shingle in Johnsonville, with the intention of removing to New Boston at the first flattering opportunity. Into his office strolled an elderly male gossip, one of those men who do the “heavy standing round” in villages, and who have discovered whispering galleries at certain sunny corners, where they can overhear all the marvels of the neighborhood.
“Curious goings-on at Josh Turner’s, I understand,” said this useful personage, dropping into one of Underhill’s arm-chairs. “Sat up with ’em last night, I understand. Say he’s troubled with a ghost. Pshaw! No ghosts nowadays; ain’t legal tender; don’t circulate. It’s a bad conscience, that’s what it is. Tell you, Josh Turner’s got an awful sink-hole in one corner of his conscience. Hadn’t treated those children right—brother’s children, too—only brother. Sam Turner came home, seven years ago, with fifty thousand dollars and two motherless children. Sam died—left Josh executor—gardeen of the boy and girl. Where’d the money go to? Josh Turner can’t tell. Sam’s estate settled up for nothing, an’ Josh Turner turned out rich. Never made enough before to lay up anything, and here he is rich, retired from business, investing in railroads, painting his house. Looks kind of ugly, don’t it? Then he made the girl teach school, and ’prenticed the boy to a trade, and let him run off to the army. Can’t say I’d take Josh Turner’s conscience for all his money. Well, I must be going. Don’t mention this, Mr. Underhill. A lawyer ought to know how to keep secrets. Good morning.”
From other sources our young barrister learned further particulars. The four children who had been born to Joshua Turner by his first two wives were now all away from home, the two girls prosperously married, the boys in successful business. By his living wife he had another boy, at present five years old. In this youngster the whole affection of both father and mother seemed to have centered. They cared little for the other children; they cared nothing for the nephew and niece. It was currently reported in Johnsonville that little Jimmy Turner would inherit the whole, or nearly the whole, of the Josh Turner property.
“The old woman will bring that around certain,” said Phineas Munson, the gossip above mentioned, during a second call on Underhill; “she won’t let the old man catch his last breath till he makes out a will in favor of her Jimmy. Dunno why I call her old, though; ain’t more than forty. S’pose I call her so because she’s such a poor, sickly, faded creetur. She’s in a decline, and coughs to kill. But, sick as she is, she’s got a temper like a wildcat, and she governs Josh Turner at the first yelp. By the way, heard any more about the ghost? Say it’s a drummer, and drums like sixty. Wonder if Freddy Turner’s dead? However, I don’t believe in ghosts. All fiddle-faddle. Haw, haw, haw,” he laughed just here. “I said, all fiddle-faddle. No drumming, don’t ye see? Fiddle-faddle. Didn’t mean to joke, though. Good morning.”
While Underhill was thus studying the shadows of the Turner past, the village was going mad about the ghost. The Johnsonville drummings ought long since to have taken their place, in the history of “spiritual manifestations,” by the side of the Stratford Mysteries and the Rochester Knockings. The house was invaded by so many people, and they were there at times in such incommodious crowds, that the Turners were nearly as much troubled by the living as by their spiritual visitant. What added to the excitement was the publication of a list of the casualties in one of Sherman’s minor battles, wherein the name of Frederic Turner figured among the dead. Nothing could be more obvious than that the drummer was the ghost of Joshua Turner’s ill-used nephew.
Of course, efforts were made to trace the disturbance to a human, or at least a physical origin. The village materialists, that is to say, the doctor, the apothecary, Phineas Munson, and two or three more, nosed about the house by day and watched it by night. One talked of a peculiar circulation in the chimney; another of a loose shingle on the roof which clattered in the wind; another suspected little Jimmy Turner, and wanted to tie him up. All these frantic hypotheses were laughed to scorn by the great majority of Johnsonvillians, who found it more rational to believe in a ghost, and far more amusing.
Curiously enough, Mrs. Turner was one of the most vehement of the unbelievers. This determined woman, feeble and ghastly under the prolonged gripe of consumption, searched the dwelling from garret to cellar, by day and by night, to discover the trick which she declared was being played upon her household. In this investigation she displayed a feverish eagerness which was attributed partly to her native fervor of character and partly to the nervous excitability of invalidism. Small, meager, and narrow-shouldered, her clothes hanging straight along her skeleton figure, her puny and pointed face of a uniform waxen yellow, her large, prominent, lusterless eyes wandering hurriedly from object to object, her shrunken, glassy forefinger beckoning here and there in tremulous suspicion, she was woeful and almost terrible to look upon. So anxious was she to dissipate the mystery, that, passionately as she loved her little boy, she threatened him and whipped him to make him avow that he did the drumming. Then, when convinced of his innocence, she cried and coughed over him until it seemed as if her flickering life would go out in the spasm.
Against the assumption that the noises were produced by Frederic Turner’s ghost, she argued with praiseworthy energy though inexcusable logic. At first, she scouted the idea that the boy was dead, asserting that he would yet reappear to make trouble for his family. When further news demolished this supposition, she declared that the drummings had commenced a week after the decease, so that there could be no connection between the two facts. But popular credulity stepped in here to controvert her; people now remembered to have heard the mysterious uproar for some time back; one and another had been startled by it a week before Josh Turner complained of it; in short, the dates of the drumming and the death became identical. Even the cautious and intelligent were obliged to admit that the manifestations began several days before the news of the boy’s decease reached the village, and to infer that this circumstance tended to disprove all supposition of trickery. Why should a person, who did not know that Fred Turner was dead, set out to counterfeit Fred Turner’s ghost?
For the ear of her husband, Mrs. Turner had another theory which she did not care to make public. “It’s that girl,” she said. “It’s your own niece, Marian Turner, that does it.”
> “But you’ve searched her room and found nothing,” groaned the husband, as sick in soul as his wife in body. “You’ve searched the whole house.”
“Yes, but I shall find something. She’s precious sly and deep, but I shall find her out yet. I have my eye on her, every day, while I am talking about other things.”
“But when the—the noises commenced, Marian didn’t know about Freddy.”
“Yes, she did. You believe me, Joshua Turner, she did. She had a letter or something. Then she knew that the news would get to us later, and she begun her tantrums. O, she’s precious deep—precious deep! I wish she’d cleared out when her brother did.”
“I wish he hadn’t gone,” moaned the husband. “I wish I’d treated him better, and kept him by us.”
“Joshua Turner, you haven’t got the spirit of a man. If you had half my spunk, sick and dying as I am, you wouldn’t whimper that way. Everything has gone right, except that you are a coward—a poor, feeble, sick-headed creature—afraid of your own shadow. If you only would pluck up a spirit and let this thing worry itself out, everything would be right.”
“Pluck up a spirit? I tell you I can’t. It’s killing me.”
“Well,” she gasped, laying her hand on her breast as if to aid the action of her withered lungs—“well, it’s killing me, too. That is, you are killing me. But do I flinch? Just look at me and see how I bear it. I wish to Heavens,” concluded this audacious woman, “that I could give you my courage.”
“Sarah Turner, you have no conscience,” he replied, in a tone which was not so much reproachful as horror-stricken.
“How dare you say that to me, Josh Turner? And you know who I am suffering for and slaving for! It isn’t for myself that I care,” she continued, coughing and crying. “It’s for Jimmy. I want Jimmy to be well off. And you want to rob him—leave him a beggar!”
“O my God! my God!” groaned Turner, and walked from her without another word.
“See here,” she called after him, suppressing her tears. “If I find that girl is doing it, will you turn her out of the house? Will you send her off?”
He hesitated, looking at her sternly, and at last sighed, “No; I have done harm enough to Sam’s children.”
She turned her back upon him and left him, with an ejaculation of anger and contempt.
Meanwhile the manifestations pursued their course, to the beatitude of the wonder-loving, and the perplexity of the philosophical. One noteworthy circumstance was that the drummer seemed to hate a crowd. He rarely vouchsafed his music to the swarms of curious who invaded the house, while he poured it forth without stint to enliven the solitude of the Turners. He drummed rarely on a Sunday, frequently on a Saturday, and almost always in the evening. His favorite place of recreation was the parlor, and the listener in whom he delighted was Joshua Turner. Nevertheless, he sometimes assailed little Jimmy with long rolls and tattoos which almost drove him out of his five-year-old senses. The poor child was hysterically afraid of the ghostly visitant, and, at the first murmur of spiritual sheepskin, would fly screaming to his mother.
“There! don’t be scared at it,” she was once heard to whisper, while looking in his face with the anxiety of ardent love. “If Jimmy won’t mind it, he shall be very rich some day, and have all the pretty things he wants.”
At last, Joshua Turner remarked, apropos of a clamor which had driven the boy into spasms, “Sarah, it is killing our child.”
“I know it,” she burst out with a despairing cry. “O, I wish you and I were both dead. Then it would stop.”
“If justice were done it might stop,” replied the man, solemnly.
“Joshua Turner, don’t you do it!” she gasped, tottering up to him and putting her tallowy face close to his. “Don’t you do what you’re thinking of! If you do, I’ll haunt you. I will. I’ll haunt you to the grave, and beyond it.”
Not long after this interview, Mrs. Turner began to hint to the neighbors that her husband’s mind was failing. The charge seemed natural enough; it was countenanced by his extravagance of speech and violence of manner; at times, especially when he talked of the drummer, his conversation was little less than maniacal. For instance, he once broke out in the following fashion upon gossip Phineas Munson, meantime walking frantically round the rocking-chair in which that gentleman was blandly oscillating.
“What do you come here for? Rubadub-dub” (beating on his hip); “is that it? Like drumming? I’ll drum for you. Rubadub-dub, rubadub-dub. I’ll be your ghost, Mr. Munson, I’ll furnish you with the music of the spheres; send the whole band around to your house every evening; give you a diabolical drumming serenade; give you one now. Rubadub-dub, rubadub-dub, rubadub-dub. Had enough of it, Mr. Munson? Now go to every house in the village and report that you have seen the ghost. Do you want anybody to look more like a ghost than I do? I tell you I shall be one shortly; I am being killed by this thing and these people. Why can’t they let me bear my torment alone? Why can’t you go home, Mr. Munson? Yes, go home!”
“Tell you I never was so insulted in my life,” repeated Phineas to his fellow-citizens. “Begin to think the old woman’s right. Turner must be cracked. Wouldn’t ’a’ pitched into me so, if he hadn’t been. Ought to have a conservator and a keeper. If he ain’t watched, there’ll be more ghosts of his manufacture.”
What was the attitude of Marian Turner during this grotesque and yet horrible drama? Underhill watched her narrowly, not so much in a spirit of philosophical investigation, as because he was on the verge of being in love with her. The theory which he had constructed for the girl was, that she knew that she had been plundered by her uncle, and that she was now engaged in terrifying the plunderer into a restitution. Looking at her from this point of view, he was astonished at the determination, the hardness of spirit, with which she persecuted this family. She was killing her uncle and his wife; she was driving her childish cousin into chronic hysteria; yet she did not flinch. Perhaps she excused herself on the ground that the two elders had been in a manner the slayers of her brother, and that it was not in reality she, but their own evil consciences, which put them to the torture. Nevertheless, he would have been glad to discover in her more of feminine gentleness and even feminine weakness. It must be admitted that man does not easily adore a self-helpful woman.
Meanwhile the girl fascinated him. In the first place, she was the belle of the village, and the belles of other places were too far away to counteract her attraction. In the second place, she was bright and strange; she had entertaining oddities of thought and utterance; she had what he considered dazzling flashes of sarcasm. On the whole, she was the most interesting and original girl that he had ever seen, even putting aside her supposed connection with the so-called spiritual manifestations.
“Talking of ghosts,” she one day said to Underhill, “I only know of Mrs. Turner. Did you ever see another person in this world, who so evidently belonged in the next? Why don’t she follow her two predecessors? How it must provoke them to see her linger so, and the house new painted and papered!”
“You have very little pity for her,” replied Underhill, gravely.
“I haven’t a particle. Why should I pity a woman who would marry such an inveterate woman-killer as my uncle?
He reminds me of the returned missionaries who used to come to South Hadley School to pick out second and third wives. Why is it that missionaries have such a matrimonial hunger? I suppose it is living among cannibals that demoralizes them.”
“I really don’t like to hear you joke in this manner,
Underhill ventured to protest, though in an imploring tone.
“People joke the most when they are most unhappy,” she answered, coldly. “That is, some people. Do you suppose I am gay?” she continued, with energy. Here I am, earning my own living, liable to be homeless any day, and wearing black for my only brother. Think
of it. How do you suppose I can be soft-hearted towards people who_ n
Here she stopped, as if she were saying more than was prudent; in another moment she pressed her hands to her face and began to sob. It is not difficult to believe that this interview might have ended in a very common and yet very efficacious sort of comforting; but just as Underhill had taken the girl’s hand, a servant appeared in the veranda of the haunted house, and beckoned to them wildly.
They were soon at the door of Mrs. Turner’s room; there was silence within, broken only by gurgling gasps for breath; the consumptive was stretched, pallid and quivering, on the bed; the husband was leaning over her, his face almost as cadaverous as hers. Marian Turner walked to the side of the dying woman, and looked at her steadily without speaking. Underhill hesitated, and then advanced, slowly, on tiptoe.
“Shall I call a doctor?” he whispered, while thinking, “It is too late.”
“They have gone for him,” replied Joshua Turner, without lifting his eyes from that incarnate spasm.
The invalid was struggling violently, not seemingly to live, but to speak. She rolled her glassy eyes frightfully; her dry, blue lips opened again and again, but only to gasp; her whole frame joined feebly in the wrestling for words. It was evident, from the dullness and the fixed direction of her eyes, that she did not see any one, and it is almost certain that she was not aware of the presence of Marian and Underhill. At last the utterance came; it was a kind of voiceless whispering; it merely breathed, “Don’t do it, Joshua!”
“Here is Marian,” replied the husband, doubtless fearing lest the ruling passion might avow too much. “Have you any word for her?”
A strange look crossed the dying face; it was an expression of many conflicting emotions; it hated, defied, implored, and wheedled. It said: “I detest you—don’t rob my child; I have been your enemy—don’t take advantage of my death.”
The Ghost Story Megapack Page 18
